The Portland angle on this is that Rabble spends part of his time here and part of his time in Uruguay. The bigger part of the story is how this all-too-often under-recognized engineer has played a role in many of our online activities.

Evan Henshaw-Plath is one of those entrepreneurs who’s surprisingly under the radar in comparison to the integral role he’s played in the development of some key web tools — he was the first employee and lead architect of Odeo, which later became Twitter, and was the architect of Yahoo Brickhouse’s Fire Eagle location platform. But perhaps he won’t be undercover for much longer: Henshaw-Plath has sold his 20-person Uruguay-based Ruby on Rails development shop, called Cubox, to New Context, the lean software consultancy that includes Eric Ries as a partner.